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534 Mahmut Halef Cevrioğlu

Cafer Pasha was declared the new grand admiral, the year’s naval
campaign had already started: the dismissed Grand Admiral Can-
poladzade Mustafa Pasha had to come back all the way from Rhodes.
It is hard to know what sort of a Mediterranean policy Cafer Pasha
intended to follow; but as a palace graduate admiral who had neither
naval nor governing expertise in between, he would certainly do the
best by listening to corsairs in his decisions .
27

4. Preparing the Navy: The Fleet

At the time of Cafer Pasha’s first campaign at sea during the summer
of 1632, there seems to have occurred no major incidents. Having gath-
ered intelligence regarding the Ottoman navy’s progress toward the west
with considerable strength, Maltese, Tuscan and Papal ships united
their forces around Messina. Nonetheless, allied Christian forces were
later dispersed before any encounter with the Ottomans took place .
28
After returning to Istanbul during the autumn, the Ottoman navy
underwent a process of vigorous preparation for the next spring’s cam-
paign: as usual, the winter months were spent on building new ships
and repairing the old ones. Since the galley had a traditional style, it
was easy to build them in short notice in the numerous shipyards of
the Ottoman Empire, the most considerable one being tersane-i amire
(the imperial shipyard) in the capital, or the ‘arsenal’ as the Europeans
referred to it. Regardless of their construction site, all the vessels were
fitted out (with artillery and equipment) in Istanbul . Regarding the
29
preparations in 1633, the Austrian resident at the Sublime Porte (i.e.,
the Ottoman imperial administration), Rudolf Schmid, informed his
government in February that the Ottomans were building new vessels
both at the central shipyard in Istanbul and at a smaller one in Misivri
(modern Nesebur in Bulgaria), among others . Another piece of news
30
dated 12 March from Istanbul (which found its way into a report from

27 E. Türkçelik, Meritocracy, Factionalism and Ottoman Grand Admirals, pp. 99-
100.
28 R.C. Anderson, Naval Wars in the Levant, 1559-1853, Princeton University
Press, Princeton, 1952, pp. 115-116. Anderson, unfortunately, does not specify
any reference for this information.
29 The following works can be consulted to understand how the Ottoman navy
was annually prepared for campaign, C. Imber, The Navy of Süleyman the Magnif-
icent, especially pp. 87, 96; and C. Imber, The Reconstruction of the Ottoman Fleet
after the Battle of Lepanto, 1571-1572.
30 OeStA, HHStA, Türkei I, Turcica 112-6. Constantinople, 18 February 1633,
f. 19v: «Jeziger Capitan Bassa General del mare leste in hieigen arsional auch zu
Missevria und ander orths viel neuen Galleen zurichten, glaub wohl auf dem Som-
mer sie wirdt fertig haben».

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XX - Dicembre 2023
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)